Coyne: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is entitled to our sympathy — as soon as he’s out of office

Apparently all did not go quite according to plan during Rob Ford’s stint in rehab. The Toronto Star, quoting sources at the GreeneStone facility north of Toronto, reports His Worship spent most of his time there alone in his room watching TV.

Group therapy sessions were marked by physical and verbal attacks on other inmates. He may even have been on drugs the whole time.

For the mayor, however, the experience was life-changing. The “professional help” he received at GreeneStone, he says, taught him a valuable lesson. And the lesson is: It’s not his fault. That is, it’s all his fault (“I accept full responsibility … I have no one to blame but myself”) but not in a way that he should be held to account for. Because he has a disease, a disease called alcoholism. Or rather, since alcohol is but one of the truly impressive array of drugs he has used, addiction.

In the course of “hundreds of hours” of therapy, he told reporters, “I learned that my addiction is really a disease.” It’s genetic, like his blond hair. “I was born with this disease, and I’m going to die with this disease.” The racist slurs, the gangster chums, the conflicts of interest, the attacks on the chief of police, the casual invitation to his friends to have sex with his wife in front of him, the lies about all of it? That wasn’t him. It was the disease. “When you have this disease, you say things, do things that aren’t you.” As for the future, well, who can say? “I’m going to take one day at a time. That’s how you deal with this disease.”

Hence Ford’s declaration, after his usual “all I can do is apologize” mantra, that he is “not asking you for forgiveness.” Of course he isn’t. He is asking for absolution. Forgiveness would imply he, personally, did something wrong. He is merely apologizing on behalf of his disease.

It is not my purpose here to deny that addiction is a disease, or that some people are born with a predisposition to it. All the same, it is a tricky line Ford is attempting to walk: just sick enough that he cannot be held responsible for his actions, but not so sick as to be disqualified from office. To suggestions that the stress of political life is perhaps not the best thing for a man in his condition, Ford replies the job is part of his therapy. “Keeping busy is the best thing for me.”

But if Ford’s hypocrisy is as outsized as his appetites, it is matched by our own. The mayor’s sudden discovery, after months of denial, that he was, in fact, in denial did not come from nowhere. It is in a long line of similar apologies in which it has become unclear whether anyone can really be held to account for anything.

First we medicalized every personal quirk or character flaw. Then we went to work scrubbing the “stigma” from the disease, until at last we arrived at the situation described by my colleague Christie Blatchford, in which Ford, as a self-confessed alcoholic, could claim protection for his disability on human rights grounds. Ford can no more be blamed for taking advantage of this than he can for anything else. We are hoist with our own therapeutic petard.

Or would be, if anyone paid a blind farthing to consistency. The selectiveness here is only partly related to Ford. While it is true the same people who would ordinarily be careful to mouth all the right pieties about addiction have been among the mayor’s most enthusiastic critics, the larger inconsistency is in our singling out of some genetic or otherwise predestined conditions over others.

Protesters hold signs during a gathering in support of shirtless jogger and teacher Joe Kiloran, who peppered Toronto Mayor Rob Ford with questions about his conduct, during the East York Canada Day parade in Toronto on July 4, 2014. TYLER ANDERSON/POSTMEDIA NEWS

You see this sort of faux sensitivity on display whenever some film star is being interviewed about, say, the moment he learned he had dyslexia. “What a relief! I thought I was just stupid.” Because, honestly, who wants to be one of them? As the possessor of a certified mental disability, you are entitled to every societal sympathy and legal protection. Not so if you are just incredibly thick.

This isn’t erasing a stigma. It’s simply shifting it onto someone else. Jean Chretien’s lopsided face, long the staple of every standup comic or editorial cartoonist in the country, became off limits the minute it was attributed to Bell’s palsy; his mangled syntax was likewise good for a laugh until it was diagnosed as aphasia. Yet he could no more help it if it wasn’t.

Nor is this limited to genetics. A tendency to addiction is but one of several disorders from which Ford would seem to suffer. He appears to have the self-control of a nine-year-old, for one, coupled with a desperate need for approval. Doubtless a psychologist could list others. Some of these may be the product of chemical imbalances or brain structure; some, almost certainly, stem from his upbringing. But is he really to blame for either?

I’ve no objection, in sum, to the idea that Ford’s behaviour is the result of circumstances beyond his control. I’m just not sure how that distinguishes him from anyone else. It’s not clear to me why someone who is lazy or dishonest or incompetent should be judged more harshly than someone who is merely addicted to drugs. After all, something made them that way.

The relevant distinction, it seems to me, is not between the things we can control and the things we can’t, but how we react in either event. If it is unfair to hold someone with the gene for addiction to the same standard as someone to whom fate has been kinder, it is entirely fair to judge one addict against another.

Whatever may explain people’s behavioural problems, moreover, the practical question is how to prevent them doing harm to others. Ford’s “demons” may be a problem for him, but right now they’re even more of a problem for Toronto. He’s entitled to our sympathy, just as soon as he’s out of office.

Coun. Doug Ford gets into a heated debate with Coun. Mari Augimeri during the integrity commissioner’s report on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s conduct during city council at city hall in Toronto on July 9, 2014. LAURA PEDERSEN/POSTMEDIA NEWS

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile